First up, here’s an image of all my sound output preference panel looks like. Most importantly to note on this is the name of the devices. In my case, I have two devices “Internal Speakers” and “Plantronics Headset”. These two names will need to be edited into the AppleScripts.

Image of my sound output panel showing the internal speakers and my headset/mic.

Make sure you have MacSpeech Dictate running and it is the active application. Go to the Tools menu and select Commands. This will bring up a list of all the scripts in the “Available Commands” box that MacSpeech Dictate shows as a tool. You’ll want to locate Globals for a list of all global scripts. Once you’ve clicked on Globals, click on the “+” symbol to create a new script.

In the command field, type what you want to say to start the script. Make sure the type is set to AppleScript. Cut and paste the following into the source:

tell application “System Preferences” to activate
tell application “System Events”
get properties
tell process “System Preferences”
tell application “System Preferences” to reveal anchor “output” of pane id “com.apple.preference.sound”
delay 2
set theRows to every row of table 1 of scroll area 1 of ¬
tab group 1 of window “sound”
set theOutputs to {} as list
repeat with aRow in theRows
if (value of text field 1 of aRow as text) ¬
is equal to “Internal Speakers” then
set selected of aRow to true
exit repeat
end if
end repeat
end tell
end tell
tell application “System Preferences” to quit

Please note the words “Internal Speakers”. This is where you will replace with the device name you want the script to switch to when it runs.

You’ll want to create a separate script for each output device that you have. I hope this helps, if a figure out how to program a script that will toggle through the various output devices I’ll be sure to post it.

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Switching Sound Output with Dictate

One of the features that I’m hearing about Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the capability to correct misunderstood words and phrases using a learning process. This learning process figures out where it made a mistake, thus making the mistake less likely to happen in the future. Part of it even allows someone to spell out a word. This would fully eliminate the need to touch the keyboard at all.

Right now MacSpeech Dictate is at version 1.0. Rumor on the street is that version 1.1 will start implementing this active learning process. I hope so, the paradigm of speaking and watching the words appear on the screen gets broken when I have to actively moved to the keyboard or mouse.

This inclusion — that I had initially overlooked — is really important because the AppleScript programming language allows a lot of control over the functionality of the most operations in the Mac operating system and applications on the Mac.

Well, so far I have found MacSpeech Dictate great purchase!

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Dictation in process…

I had heard about Dictate winning an award earlier this year. It reminded me to get an update on what was out there with regard to speech recognition software. Basically, on the Windows front things had matured but there was one standout program. That program is Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Unfortunately, it is not available for the Macintosh operating system. That changed, when the company MacSpeech licensed the software engine behind Dragon NaturallySpeaking for their Dictate software. Obviously, Dictate is a program written for the Macintosh operating system.

As typical with most software when it’s first released, there will be bugs. So I decided to sit this one out for just a couple months until the release bugs were ironed out. Well, I just got it tonight.

The package comes with a Plantronics microphone headset that easily hooked into a USB port on my iMac.   The installation process was fairly easy. After a little bit of training, I’ve jumped right into trying to use the software is much is possible.  Guessing at my accuracy rate right now I probably need to do some more training so that it can understand me better. But I am very VERY impressed. This entire blog entry was done with minimal editing involving a keyboard. If you’ve always wanted to talk to your computer and have it type what you’re saying the software is out there to do it.

I am seriously beside myself that this actually works.

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MacSpeech Dictate

My computer room has been lacking something.  A computer.  I’ve had my computer parked in my living room right in front of the television so I could watch and surf.  Stupidly, I have it set up on the coffee table where I sit awkwardly on the floor.  By the time I’d get up, my legs would feel awful.

I’ve wanted to set something up so I could watch my Tivo upstairs.  I had three choices.  I could somehow rig up a video system via custom cabling through an AV system (expensive, but high quality sound/video).  Buy a second Tivo (also expensive and causing me to incur a second monthly fee and buying a SECOND non-HD Tivo system).  And then there’s the Slingbox…

The only real problem I had going in was the video quality.  I knew it wasn’t going to be super crisp because it was being compressed and streamed over my local network.  To make matters worse, I use a wireless network bridge between my entertainment center area and upstairs.  This means that the streaming speed would be reduced further because it has to go between the slower wireless portion of my network.

Setup was straight forward to use the Slingbox Pro over my local network.  I had everything working on both my Windows XP laptop and my iMac within 30 minutes (including the download time for the software).  My wireless access points (Apple Airport Extremes) don’t have the option to forward ports to DHCP clients.  Once I had it up and running, I tinkered with the network settings so it wouldn’t use DHCP and I can hopefully access the Slingbox anywhere.

So far, things are going well.  I do need to tinker further to see if I can get my DVD player streaming.  I also have my local (analog) cable working fine.  But the main thing, having my computer actually in the computer room and being able to watch my Tivo there has been accomplished.

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Slingbox Pro

I’ll try to get a couple of my neat projects up in the coming week.

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Missing In Action